Quote

I actually went into writing first to supplement my income, which was a strange thing to do and actually failed.

Steve Toltz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Steve Toltz
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Stephen Toltz
Thing
Failed
Income
Strange
Went
Actually
Firsts
First
Supplement
Writing
Supplements

More quotes by Steve Toltz

Image
To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.
Steve Toltz
Image
I don't have a great respect for reality or getting the 'facts' as a means of putting together a story.
Steve Toltz
Image
There are a lot of artists that return to the same subject. Whether it's the natural subject, or the focus or the subconscious focus of their entire lives, it often is repeated.
Steve Toltz
Image
Optimism isnt funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. Its exaggeration.
Steve Toltz
Image
The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe...and yet the music goes on.
Steve Toltz
Image
After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!
Steve Toltz
Image
People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.
Steve Toltz
Image
Generally as a rule I am not. Unless I am super in love with a particular author, because I just want to read masterpieces. I just want to read one amazing book after another. As a completist you are generally reading the bad ones.
Steve Toltz
Image
Or about how when you're a child, to stop you from following the crowd you're assaulted with the line If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you? but when you're an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren't you?
Steve Toltz
Image
The universe doesn't really care if you bounce back. It doesn't feel that weird to write about paralysis or being in hospital or losing a child or, you know, splitting up with your wife, because that's just life.
Steve Toltz
Image
Regrets came up and asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty handed.
Steve Toltz
Image
Sometimes they [people] throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them.
Steve Toltz
Image
My writing goal is just this desperation to get as much done as possible. It's never a comfortable, relaxed thing. Especially because I know so much of the story that I want to tell and I feel so far away from the end. Actually feels a hundred years away, and every hour I'm not working is another hour away from finishing.
Steve Toltz
Image
...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.
Steve Toltz
Image
Don't be afraid to have nothing.
Steve Toltz
Image
[I'll teach you] how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain and how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated.
Steve Toltz
Image
When we finished the kiss she said laughing, I can taste your loneliness - it tastes like vinegar. That annoyed me. Everyone knows loneliness tastes like cold potato soup.
Steve Toltz
Image
I haven't been part of the criminal world.
Steve Toltz
Image
As an artist you can use your own discomfort and neuroses and difficulties and at least transform them into something else. Without that you're just neurotic and uncomfortable.
Steve Toltz
Image
Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.
Steve Toltz